The detective's dark side

In 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle murdered Sherlock Holmes. After writing two dozen stories, Doyle was sick of his creation and felt he was distracted from more serious literature. So, in The Adventure of the Final Problem, he drowned his detective in the foaming abyss of the Reichenbach Falls, Switzerland. "Couldn't you bring him back?" Doyle was repeatedly asked. "He is at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls," he retorted crossly. "And there he stays."

It was not to be. Nine years later, in 1901, Doyle was forced to "revive" his subtle, hawk-eyed detective in what was to become his masterpiece, The Hound of the Baskervilles. The sleuth's disappearance had caused such a public outcry that Doyle relented. Sherlockians had marched in protest down Fleet Street and sent letters of complaint to the Prince of Wales. Readers of The Strand magazine, which serialised Holmes, threatened to cancel their subscriptions. Now the greatest investigator of all had risen again, complete with pipe, Stradivarius and magnifying glass (though not deerstalker: the hat was added by the illustrator Sidney Paget).

The result was a Victorian whodunnit of extraordinary, brooding power. Doyle took a literary risk with his new monster. The use of a canine rather than Professor Moriarty, say, as the villain of The Hound of the Baskervilles was a brilliant device. Given the British fondness for dogs, the hell-hound must have given readers of The Strand a peculiar frisson.

Dogs are common in the Sherlock Holmes tales, but not murderous ones: Conan Doyle's own dog – half spaniel, half lurcher – was the model for the virtuous Toby, who brings the criminals to book in the second of the Holmes novels, The Sign of Four (1890). A precursor of the Baskerville hound (never named, but certainly not Rover) is found in Doyle's short story "The King of the Foxes", where a monstrous fox turns out to be a wolf escaped from a menagerie. Yet the Baskerville hound remains unique in British literature and has become a legend.

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Fans of the Baker Street detective can rejoice that all nine of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries are republished this month. The reprints, with suitably atmospheric covers (baying phantom dogs; swirling London fog) are aimed at younger readers who will have heard of Doyle but not necessarily have read him. Sherlock Holmes is name-checked by Arctic Monkeys, for example, in their song A Certain Romance. Stephen Fry is a die-hard Sherlockian, as is Alexander McCall Smith.

The best Holmes stories were written before 1917, when Conan Doyle converted to Spiritualism. A hybrid of mysticism and Low Church gloom, the pseudo-religion flourished amid the bereavement of the First World War; Doyle had lost a son in the conflict. Had he dabbled in mediums and moonshine before Baskervilles was published in 1902, the fire-breathing beast might really have come from the Beyond, as we are at first led to believe.

Instead, The Hound of the Baskervilles is leavened by a marvellous corny humour. ("I have ample evidence," Holmes tells Sir Henry Baskerville, "that you are being dogged in London.") And, memorably, it's the only Sherlock Holmes tale, short or long, where the story overshadows the detective, Holmes being "absent" for almost half of the narrative (though really on the moors in disguise).

The detective's darker side, made explicit in the drug-taking of The Sign of Four, contradicts the familiar deerstalker image. Sherlock Holmes was addicted to cocaine and injected himself with morphine to stave off bouts of boredom. Did his creator also have a weakness for narcotics? Conan Doyle was familiar with stimulants from his medical studies at Edinburgh University in the early 1880s, and later witnessed varieties of addiction (notably to rum) as a trainee surgeon aboard a whaling ship. It is possible that hallucinogens helped Doyle appreciate the shimmering, greenish light emanated by certain spiritualist mediums.

In 1891, two years before he precipitated the Reichenbach Crisis, Conan Doyle moved with his family to the nondescript London suburb of South Norwood, where he would later write his two-volume History of Spiritualism and call for a new science of the paranormal: Plasmology. A number of the Sherlock Holmes stories unfold in Norbury and other parts of London south of the river; Brixton is the scene of the gruesome ritual murder in A Study in Scarlet (1888); Woolwich and Croydon crop up in His Last Bow (1917). The Holmes adventures are, among other things, metropolitan fantasias, atmospherically fixed in the outskirts of Victorian London.

The Baker Street mysteries, however, make up only a small part of Doyle's literary output. As well as whodunnits, he wrote a variety of non-fiction works including The Coming of the Fairies (1922), in which he tried to authenticate photographs of wood nymphs. Hopelessly in thrall to table-rapping and other fog-bound marvels, Doyle was convinced that the deceased could return to life through luminous voice trumpets.

Even if many in post-Somme Britain were communing with the war dead, only the creator of The Hound of the Baskervilles, one feels, could have travelled to the Welsh mining village of Penylan (not a noted pocket of the paranormal) in search of clairvoyants. Unfortunately, there is no doubting Doyle's sincerity. Spiritualism, the first of the modern heresies, eclipsed all other concerns in his adult years; Doyle had found an alternative in crystal-balling to the harsh Catholicism of his upbringing (at Stonyhurst College he was routinely birched by Jesuits).

In spite of his spook-dabbling, Doyle was a steely moralist, who campaigned on behalf of battered wives and against the persecution of Jews and the iniquities of the Belgian Congo. His best-selling pamphlet The War in South Africa, issued in 1902, condemned British cruelty towards the Boers. But the real drama of Doyle's life remained Sherlock Holmes, even though in 1912 he tried once more to elude his morphine-hungry sleuth with The Lost World, a science fantasy about pterodactyls and stegosauri. The 60th and final Holmes adventure, "Shoscombe Old Place" (from The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes), was published three years before Doyle died in 1930. By then the tall, ascetic scientist-sleuth had given pleasure to millions.

Doyle's troubled relationship with his creation was fraught with dark, father-son undercurrents, and was far from elementary. What other fictional detective has become so charmingly real to his readers as the occupant of 221b Baker Street? The revival of Sherlock Holmes is a treat. Meanwhile, a spectral bogey hound continues to prowl the Baskerville moors, reappearing to each new generation of Holmes readers as the Fido from hell.